Salivary biomarkers of stress in psychological patients on fluoxetine therapy

In the last recent decades, stress has become an inevitable part plaguing the daily lives. Psychological stress has a negative impact over physical, mental and social well-being of a person. It has been suggested to play an important role in causation or precipitation of multitude of medical and dental problems ranging from serious heart diseases, cancers, gastrointestinal diseases, to common headaches, migraine, recurrent oral ulcerations, burning and dry mouth. In order to better understand the role of stress, valid and reliable measurement of stress is of utmost importance. Since, most of methods used for the diagnosis of stress are questionnaires form (subjective methods) which depend on person and there is many inter individual variation between subjects, thus there is increased need of biological stress markers to provide an objective, reliable and authentic evidence of stress. Self-reporting subjective questionnaire forms in stress evaluation and as psychological diagnostic mean provide highly inconsistent results according to patient’s mood and attitude. And this is because many individuals suffering from stress related problems have a tendency to either negate or exaggerate the real condition; which may lead to a deviation in the study and discompose the results. Thus there is a high need for studying the changes caused by stress in the human body to evaluate the usefulness of the bio physiological indicators or biomarkers to provide a reliable objective evaluation and assessment of a stress and psychologically related conditions. Salivary biomarkers are one of most widely researched area of interest because it might to provide a reliable, noninvasive and objective measurements of the response of the body, also because of easy and rapid collection of samples compared to the blood and urine samples thereby increasing the patient compliance. Many biomarkers have been used in determination of stress such as cortisol levels, immunoglobulins, cardiovascular parameters. Studies showed there is an evidence of sensitivity of SAA levels in response to different stressful conditions, physically and psychologically..